''Collapse'' attempts -- to use history as a science to forecast whether the current world order will fail. To research his new book, Diamond traveled to the scenes of vanished societies like Easter Island, Norse Greenland, the Anasazi, the Mayans.
Diamond rightly warns of alarming trends in biodiversity, soil loss, freshwater limits (China is depleting its aquifers at a breakneck rate), overfishing (much of the developing world relies on the oceans for protein) and climate change (there is a strong scientific consensus that future warming could be dangerous). These and other trends may lead to a global crash: ''Our world society is presently on a nonsustainable course.'' The West, especially, is in peril: ''The prosperity that the First World enjoys at present is based on spending down its environmental capital.'' Calamity could come quickly: ''A society's steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth and power.'' (From: New York Times, “ 'Collapse': How the World Ends” By Gregg Easterbrook Published: January 30, 2005)
Author Biography
Born in Boston in 1937, Diamond is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Initially he specialized in conservation biology, studying bird diversity in New Guinea; in 1985 he won one of the early MacArthur ''genius grants.''
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